Can anyone tell me what are the pre-requisites to learning lambda calculus (if any)?
Can anyone tell me what are the pre-requisites to learning lambda calculus (if any)?
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Can anyone tell me what are the pre-requisites to learning lambda calculus (if any)?
That really depends on what you want to do with the lambda calculus. If you want to learn it just to see how it works there really aren’t any prerequisites; it’s pretty self-contained. However, if you want to understand any of the proofs about it (Turing-completeness, Church numerals, normalization, etc.) you might need more math prereqs. In particular, I’d suggest a background in inductive proof techniques, especially structural induction. It also might be nice to know a little about either the halting problem or some sort of incompleteness theorem, since some of the fun results with lambda calculus involve non-computability.